Automation of the DEM reconstruction from ERS Tandem pairs

The difficulties related to InSAR DEM reconstruction and the computational burden necessary to get the final result strongly depend on the topography of the area of interest and accuracy requirements. Whenever high quality results are requested, a multi-interferograrn approach is strongly recommended, especially for repeat-pass interferometric data, such as ERS Tandem acquisitions. In this paper we recall the rationale of the multi-baseline strategy for DEM reconstruction and we propose a new phase unwrapping algorithm. In fact, phase unwrapping is the major obstacle to be overcome in the processing chain for InSAR DEM reconstruction, and often cannot be performed in a totally automatic way. Our attempt is to develop a robust processing chain that does not require user interaction and where possible prior information can be easily exploited. Preliminary results obtained by this algorithm are indeed very promising